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March 24, 2022 - RFK Jr. The Defender
17:13
Child Psychiatrist Dr Mark McDonald

Child Psychiatrist Dr. Mark McDonald discusses the state of our children with RFK Jr.

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I want to welcome to the podcast today Dr.
Mark McDonald, who is a psychiatrist from Los Angeles.
He has a specialty in child and adolescent treatment, and he has been an outspoken critic of the impacts of lockdowns and masking and other countermeasures on the happiness and mental health of America's children.
He has a book out called United States of Fear, How America Fell Victim to a Mass Delusional Psychosis.
Welcome to the podcast, Doctor.
Thank you, Bobby.
Glad to be here.
It's good to see you again.
Yeah, you too.
So, I really wanted you on here because I had heard one of the talks that you gave about the impacts of the lockdowns on children and on mental health of children.
And it was really gut-wrenching.
And I had, from the beginning of the pandemic, I had tried to find out answers from the public health authorities about what the cause of the pandemic are.
We were told what the benefits would be, that it would stop coronavirus, which it did not do.
Nobody ever talked about the cost.
You didn't see the cost debated on CNN or Fox News.
There were no experts on economists, psychiatrists, doctors who were talking about deferment of medical treatment or any of these really important questions were the lockdowns.
We're going to avert more problems than they would cause, more costs than they would impose on us.
And I think nowadays people are coming to the realization that they were a grave and catastrophic mistake for our citizens and particularly our children.
I completely agree with you.
I'm seeing the effects of these government lockdowns, shutdowns, closures, social distancing measures, quarantining, masking, shutting down schools, just now coming to fruition.
My concerns now are actually worse than they were a year and a half ago when I just saw it as a temporary disaster.
We're now seeing this as an ongoing problem that's probably likely, in my view as a clinician, to continue for years, if not generations.
There's a difference between scratching your skin and getting a sunburn and then having it recover after a week versus a constant, slow burning and scratching that causes a complete change of the cell structure That then leads to cancer in three years, five years, ten years.
We're seeing the latter right now.
We've already seen children of all ages losing the capacity to speak, to articulate because of this chronic masking.
We're already seeing the loss of cognitive function, meaning brain development.
Due to a lockdown and shutdown that has persisted now for over two years of children living in isolation without going to school, it's gotten so bad that the CDC just a week or two ago announced that they were going to lower the bar For what's considered acceptable child development by two years.
So now if you're two years behind, you're normal.
So rather than admit that they've caused a complete collapse of the development of children's brains, they're just redefining what a normal brain is.
These are just a few examples of what I've seen in the last two years, and they're going to get worse.
So the CDC has adjusted its official milestones so that it used to be for the last 30 years.
The milestones have said a child should walk at 12 months.
Now the new milestones say 18 months.
The old milestones say a child should have 50 words by 24 months, and I think that was pushed to 30 months.
And so what they're doing is they're normalizing these injuries to our children.
They're trying to say to us, there's nothing wrong.
It's all normal.
And the question is, you know, you're a psychiatrist.
Why are not pediatricians in revolt right now?
They're the ones who take these measurements.
Well, now you can't send, as a parent, you can't send your child to school and if your child falls down and hurts his knee, you cannot allow the school nurse to give your child an ibuprofen, Tylenol, Aspirin, without a written signature saying that you agree.
To allow your child to be treated with Tylenol and aspirin.
But your child can get testosterone injection prescriptions perfectly fine without even you knowing about it.
Your child's name can be changed if your child wishes to without you being told and your teachers are required to use a different name.
So My view, in summary, is that pediatrics, pediatricians, the American Academy of Pediatrics, as well as other medical organizations like the AMA, like the American Psychological Association, the American Academy of Psychiatry, they are completely corrupt.
They are not beholden to the needs of their practitioners anymore.
They're beholden to interest groups, political, union, pharmacy interest groups.
They are political organizations.
They are not medical organizations.
So I think that is the reason why largely there has not been an outcry at this obvious example of covering your tracks and covering the evidence of having harmed children by the CDC and other government agencies.
The Brown University study Show that there is a 22-point loss in IQ among the youngest children during the two-year pandemic.
How does that work anyway?
I didn't even know that, you know, infants could take an IQ test.
Well, Brown University Department of Pediatrics published that study in fall of last year, and then they did a follow-up one with a larger number of kids up to age five, and they expanded it beyond just IQ point loss.
They expanded it to cognitive functioning, and they found the IQ point loss that you mentioned in infants, zero to 18 months, Using some, I would call them more surrogate markers of IQ testing that you would see in adults.
I actually don't know what the exact tests are that they use for that young of an age.
It's a very specialized field, but they did use validity measurements to ensure that the results that they had were honest and truthful.
They didn't just make up the tests.
There are some evaluations you can use for young kids, putting together paper clips, grabbing and putting blocks in different areas.
And there is a correlation between the performance on those tests and how the IQ develops at later years as the kids get older and they can do written tests and more sophisticated exams.
They found an IQ point loss in infants up to 18 months.
Then they went up to age five and they said, well, let's just test not just IQ, but overall cognitive functioning.
And they found, I believe it was a 24% decline in overall cognitive functioning in the zero to five age group after a year, year and a half of these lockdowns.
That means that children's brains are actually being damaged By keeping them deprived, unable to be at school, unable to leave their homes, covered with masks, unable to see or hear words and articulate, we are causing brain damage to our children.
So it's not just my opinion, my anecdotal evidence.
They actually studied and reported this at Brown University and found that the students, the kids that they studied, were actually showing brain damage after close to two years of sensory deprivation.
How does a child learn to speak?
I mean, do they need to see other people speak?
And also, there are nonverbal forms of communication, like facial expressions, that clearly a child has learned by observing his or her peers, the parents, etc.
What happens when you put a mask on children?
Well, when you have infants that are born in over 12, 18, 24 months, they really don't see any faces at all.
All that they can come up with is really seeing eyes.
So when children, babies, are looking at their mother's faces intensely, they generally look at facial expressions and they hear exaggerated tones.
The sing-song wilt of a mother's speech is the way that Mothers biologically, intrinsically teach language and sounds to their children.
That's why they exaggerate.
It's almost wired and hardwired in.
When they can't see the mouth move, they can't see the rest of the face, all they see is the eyes.
They may not be able to hear very well because the mask is muffling the sounds.
You're limiting the very early stages of speech acquisition.
Now, as you get older, you start to see more, you know, peer-to-peer, other kids, you know, co-play, parallel play.
That's not happening because they're not actually spending time with other kids.
And if they are, all the kids are masked.
If you're a school age, all you see are masked children if you're a child, a masked teacher if you're a child in the classroom, masked administrators.
Everybody basically has been masked from the child's point of view from a very, very early age for two or three years.
So that period of time where you learn how to recognize sounds, recognize facial expressions and correlate them to sounds, and then later how you're able to observe more sophisticated verbal, nonverbal cues through the face and the ears is completely wrecked when you're covering the mouth And you're muffling sounds like this.
So the children don't even hear the articulations of the words anymore, nor are they able to articulate themselves.
There is a beautiful video that came out about a month ago where a bunch of young kids were filmed in class responding to the announcement of the teacher.
Today we get to take our masks off.
All the children, they all started cheering.
They were delighted.
So they took their masks off, and one of them said, I'm so happy to not have to wear the mask anymore.
He actually, he lisped.
He couldn't place his tongue behind his teeth.
He couldn't articulate anymore because he had stopped doing it because he didn't need to because he had his mouth covered with a mask the whole time.
Speech and language therapy referrals are up 25% to 300%.
Compared to 2019, depending on the area of the country.
That is astronomical.
That is proof positive that young children are not able to develop the capacity to speak.
And what about mental health and psychiatric injuries?
It's just devastating.
I have so many children in my practice who are unable to spend time with their friends in sleepovers because they can't separate from their mothers.
I have children who have punched through plate glass windows with their fists at age eight out of frustration because they can't go outside.
I have autistic children who are completely fine psychologically.
They have autism, but it doesn't mean that they're mentally ill.
And these autistic children, by and large, have suffered the most.
One of them was actually placed at age 12 in an inpatient psychiatric facility for the first time in her life because she could not go to school.
She could not get her therapy.
She was locked away in her house.
It was not the parents' fault.
There was nothing they could do.
She completely lost it.
She had a nervous breakdown and she was locked up, which of course made things worse because now she's cut off from her family, the only source of support that she had for two years.
I'm seeing increased drug use.
I lost two patients for the first time in my career, two patients underage due to fentanyl overdoses.
One of them took the fentanyl when he was at home because he couldn't go to school under Eric Garcetti, LA Mayor's safer at home policy.
Safer at home, and he died.
And his parents were right there in the house when he died.
They didn't know that he had taken the fentanyl until they found him face down, green in a pile of his own vomit, not breathing.
These problems I have never seen in my career, not to this degree.
Anxiety up 300%, depression 400% incidence.
Increased year over year from 2019, 2020.
Drug overdoses, suicidal ideation, actual suicides, completed suicides are up.
Every single mental illness, every single behavioral problem, including substance abuse in the older kids, is going through the roof.
There is no reason why this is happening except caused by government intervention and the failings of adults to keep our children safe.
Yeah, the only indicator...
For broad-scale social deterioration that actually improved during the COVID crisis was child abuse.
Child abuse dropped precipitously, but not because it actually dropped, but because as an artifact of the fact that most child abuse is reported by the schools.
Exactly.
And it wasn't being reported, and we were locking these children in many cases Just in the same way that during the last two years, heart attacks, cancer, gastrointestinal disorders, all of those suddenly disappeared.
So did influenza.
Well, when you see something decline that precipitously, which has been constant and steady for years and years, you have to ask yourself the question, did it really disappear or did we just stop looking for it?
We just stopped receiving reports.
Of course now, now that all the doors are open, people are back, you're starting to see all these medical problems now go through the roof.
Hospitals are overwhelmed, not with patients with coronavirus.
They're overwhelmed with patients who are dying of cancer, patients who are suffering from Weak hearts because they've had undiagnosed and untreated heart attacks and coronary artery blockages.
I suspect that the same thing is going to start happening now with children.
As we start to get an accounting of the devastation, we're going to start to see more and more evidence and reports of lingering chronic trauma injuries, ongoing abuse of children, just like we're now seeing with the speech problems.
Like we're seeing with the drug problems, like we're seeing with the lack of socialization in children, anxiety and depressive disorders.
All these problems that we just ignored and made worse are now coming back and rebounding much, much worse than they were before 2020.
Dr.
McDonough, what are the chances that any of the psychiatric associations will actually come forward and make themselves heard about this issue?
Are there any that are actually advocates for children or have they all been kind of subsumed into the orthodoxy and bribed by pharmaceutical companies?
I'm not very hopeful.
I'm writing a book right now that's not called United States of Fear, but Freedom from Fear.
In other words, let's move forward and try to get beyond the paralysis of fear that we have been in for the last two years.
And I'm modeling it after the 12-step program of AA and Jordan B. Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.
And the first step, the very first step, as we all know, who are Even people who don't have substance abuse problems, we all know someone who has.
The first step is to acknowledge that you have a problem.
And another step further down the road is to actually acknowledge not just the problem that you have, but the problem that you've caused others, the injuries, as well as to yourself and to make amends.
I do not see any evidence, none, that anyone in positions of power and authority are actually making amends and acknowledging the problem.
I've seen a pivot directly from coronavirus scare to now Russia, Ukraine.
We've flopped out one crisis for another.
One thing that we need to focus on and be obsessed about, to the exclusion of everything else, From last year to this year.
And what that means to me is that the people who caused these problems, the people who harmed our children, the people who continue to harm us in other ways, they are not going to actually acknowledge what they did and seek some form of contrition and some form of not just recovery, but actually planning for how to not make the same Error or intentional mistake again.
If we don't acknowledge what we've done, there's no way for us to not repeat the mistakes in the future.
This is my big concern right now.
It's not just cleaning up the mess.
It's not just fixing the problem.
It's actually holding people accountable.
And I want to see these associations, like the Pediatric Association, like the AMA, Certainly the CDC, FDA, all of them start to step forward and say, we really made a mistake here.
We screwed up.
We should have done better.
We harm people.
Here's what we're going to do differently in the future.
I see no evidence of that happening whatsoever, which leads me to think that if this is going to happen, if there's going to be reform, it's not going to come from the top down from the organizations and then dripping down like water in a waterfall.
It's going to come from the bottom up.
It's going to come from citizens.
It's going to come from mothers, fathers, parents speaking up and demanding That these people and these organizations admit their failings, and if they don't, to eliminate them and to start over with a fresh organization and a fresh set of people that can actually be trusted that have ethics.
Dr.
Mark McDonald, thank you so much for joining us, and thank you for fighting for our children.
Thanks, Fabi.
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